DMS frees up 150+ hours of manual Excel wrangling every week

Detroit Manufacturing Systems (DMS), a tier-one automotive supplier for Ford and Volvo, was drowning in spreadsheets. With data scattered across 25 different systems - from their ERP and HRIS to production databases - their teams had no unified view of operations.

Every day, someone pulled a report from SAP to check negative inventory levels in the supply chain. Then they had to loop back through SAP, line by line, to figure out why each part showed negative: Was it a missed back-flush? A scanning error? A forgotten inventory transfer? The manual investigation ate up hours that could have been spent solving problems instead of hunting for answers.

"We had been doing a lot of manual tasks - pulling data out of one source into an Excel file and then doing Excel gymnastics on top of that. It was a repetitive process that gave us stagnant data." - Nick Shearouse, Senior Manager, Data Analytics

DMS's CEO Bruce Smith and CTO Tom Schwartz had an ambitious vision: automate the supply chain to predict problems before they happened. But they couldn't build predictive systems on top of fragmented data.

• Purchasing and supply chain teams didn't have real-time visibility into supplier spend, indirect costs, and inventory levels
• Finance was manually consolidating 10 different metrics from 6 different sources every reporting cycle
• Daily negative inventory checks required manual SAP loops to diagnose root causes
• Different departments calculated the same metrics differently, creating trust issues with no single source of truth
• Excel-based parts availability tracking couldn't handle the complexity of concurrent builds with incoming shipments and component dependencies

During evaluation, Incorta worked onsite with DMS's IT team to prove the platform could handle their security requirements and connect to their systems. Implementation was seamless - taking just weeks instead of the months DMS had experienced with other enterprise projects.

Incorta's Direct Data Mapping™ technology connected directly to SAP, their HRIS system, and production databases, creating a digital twin of their source data with no ETL delays.

Key implementations:

• Supply chain visibility: Built a dashboard that automatically identifies negative inventory items and applies business rules to diagnose root causes: eliminating daily manual SAP loops
• Predictive parts management: For sister company Kinetic, created a system to predict which parts would run out during builds, factoring in incoming deliveries, outbound shipments, and shared components
• Purchasing analytics: Delivered on-demand supplier spend reports and indirect spend analysis that gave the team visibility they'd never had
• Automated HR processes: Connected Incorta to their RPA team to auto-populate HR documents, eliminating manual form-filling
• Executive reporting: Unified 110 metrics from six sources into one automated finance dashboard

150 hours per week of manual work eliminated

Repetitive tasks are now automated across finance, supply chain, and HR - freeing up the team to focus on strategic initiatives and proactive problem-solving.
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Real-time supply chain visibility

The supply chain team now sees negative inventory and root causes instantly instead, instead of wasting hours investigating SAP line by line.
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Unified data across all departments

Finance, HR, purchasing, and supply chain now work from the same unified data source - eliminating discrepancies where departments calculated metrics differently.
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Improved data quality

Teams could now uncover hidden issues, including HRIS calculation errors, that might have gone undetected indefinitely.
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The best data foundation for AI 

With unified, trusted data, DMS is ready to build the predictive, automated supply chain they've always envisioned.